The Undercurrent

The Undercurrent

Sarah Sawyer

Coming October 8, 20224

 

An overwhelmed new mother becomes obsessed with the unsolved disappearance of a young girl from her small Texas hometown—and unearths her own family’s dark secret. 

 

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It’s 2011 and Deecie Jeffries’s missing person’s case in Austin, Texas, is still cold. New mom Bee, struggling with postpartum depression, is living in Portland, Maine, having left Austin–and those memories–far behind. Until Leo, her childhood crush and her estranged twin Gus’s best friend, suddenly resurfaces, drawing Bee back into their shared past. 

 

Bee’s predictable life is upended, pushing her to return to her childhood home and piece together a neighborhood’s shattered history. Bee becomes consumed with a need to uncover the truth about Deecie’s disappearance and what happened to the families who lived across the field from one another—Gus, Leo, and their mothers: Mary, a homemaker, whose only escape is the local community theater, and Diana, a serious academic dedicated to her studies.

 

Told in multiple perspectives with two different timelines, The Undercurrent is a gripping portrait of motherhood, obsession, broken family bonds, and buried secrets.

 

The Undercurrent

Sarah Sawyer

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Meet the author

Sarah Sawyer

Sarah Sawyer is a high school English teacher at a boarding school in Western Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and two children. She is a graduate of Amherst College and Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English. The Undercurrent is her first novel.

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What people are saying...

"A stunning, achingly beautiful and gripping mystery. Full of page-turning suspense, intrigue and secrets, The Undercurrent is also a heartfelt story of family, childhood and the nature of obsession. I loved it.”

Chris Whitaker

author of All the Colors of the Dark

“Brilliant… I read The Undercurrent like I was under a spell, accompanied only by my own goosebumps. It’s a book about being a mother—in all the dull, punishing, and stunning ways—but then there’s also a … chilling mystery at its core. Pure glinty, flinty, propulsive perfection.”

Catherine Newman

author of We All Want Impossible Things

“With The Undercurrent, Sarah Sawyer puts a spell on her reader. The story is immersive and taut, with an increasing sense of unease that kept me turning the pages. I wanted to know what happened next because of the mystery at the center of the book but also because I came to care deeply for these characters—a testament to Sawyer’s lyrical and tender depiction of them. I read the last chapters with my heart in my throat. Readers of Tana French will love this literary page turner.”

Kate Hope Day

author of In the Quick

"Sarah Sawyer takes us on a gorgeous, twisting voyage through a shadowed landscape of memory and mystery. The Undercurrent truly carried me away. This is a shimmering debut."

Debra Jo Immergut

author of You Again

Why Zibby Loves It

Sarah tells an unforgettable story of how one small town is rocked by the disappearance of a young girl and how the reverberations of that one event changed everyone’s lives around her. It’s also, really, about one’s own reckoning with the past, the friends you keep, sibling relationships, neighborly envy and misunderstanding, female ambition and homemaking, and how to process a trauma with no clear resolution. Motherhood and friendship are the two backbones of this story, rocks in the current.